WWE In 1997 | Wrestling Timelines

9. September 22 | Thumping Home Win

Raw Is War emanates from the WWF’s spiritual home of Madison Square Garden. It’s a thumping home win of a wrestling show, one of the very best and most memorable in the history of the flagship. It’s also one of the most important. 

The show begins with a sweeping, loving look at the promotion’s history in the building, but there’s a savvy ulterior motive at play. Hulk Hogan is shown alongside Bruno Sammartino. The messaging is insidious. Hogan is just as old, in the WWF’s eyes. He’s also the WCW World Heavyweight champion. This is no accident, and neither is the idea behind the package, which is nice and sincere on its own terms, but mostly functions as juxtaposition to the futuristic edge of the new tone. 

Shawn Michaels is already the best heel in the company; he radiates obnoxious charisma in his promo building the first-ever Hell In A Cell match. In a further sign that the WWF is really starting to grasp the drip-feed episodic format, Steve Austin, captured in the crowd, threatens to raise hell later in the show. He doesn’t care about the restraining order placed on him by Owen Hart. Austin tries to get at Owen after his disqualification win over Brian Pillman. Austin is instantly smothered by police officers and threatened with nightsticks. Vince McMahon tries to calm Austin down. Vince is still trying to maintain the idea that WWF should be an upstanding organisation, but he’s getting a little smug with it. 

Austin doesn’t care about bringing it into disrepute, and neither do the fans, because it’s infinitely more fun that way. Austin, who considers the WWF yet another place that is holding him back, hits McMahon with the Stone Cold Stunner before his arrest. It’s exhilarating and transformative, not that anybody senses this at the time. It’s a way of building Austin’s antihero persona when he can’t bump. Variations of this scene define the encroaching Attitude Era. One iconic moment is followed by another as Cactus Jack defeats Hunter Hearst Helmsley in a wild Falls Count Anywhere brawl. At the finish, putting across the idea that the Hardcore Legend only just put away a strong challenge, Mick Foley collapses onto Helmsley. 

Paul Heyman is fond of saying that, in the perfect match, one wrestler goes over and their opponent gets over. This is something even more ideal, in that Cactus Jack becomes a WWF folk hero while finally, after two punishingly dull years, Triple H casts himself as an actual potential breakout superstar. The Three Faces of Foley are complete. 

Mankind is the disturbed heel (though later, his backstory will earn him sympathy as a browbeaten babyface). Dude Love is the silly babyface for lighter fare (though later, as a heel, his heartthrob delusions will cast him as the aspirational face of the company under Mr. McMahon). Cactus Jack is the ass-kicking babyface. This does not merely influence the Attitude Era; years and years later, wrestlers will also adopt a different “face” depending on the context of their programme. In 2024, 2025 and April 2026, AEW’s MJF will play his ‘American Hero’ persona when walking into England, Mexico, and Canada respectively. 

September 22, 1997 is what people think about when they think about Raw. Months after the warehouse intro promised a new, unthinkable level of carnage, the WWF delivers.